


autism is stored in the demon

by fourshoesfrank



Series: autistic demons and co. [1]
Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alexithymia, Autistic Chidi Anagonye, Autistic Michael (The Good Place), Bugs, Demon True Forms, Gen, I wrote this instead of studying, Stimming, Torture, Warning: Graphic Torture, disclaimer this is pure goblin talk but goblins are cool, i had so much fun writing this, love that tag, rated T for demons torture people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 14:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: some cowards tried to tell me that demons can't be autistic so i wrote this out of spite. i love the good place and that s3 finale broke me so how abt we have some happy things?





	autism is stored in the demon

Michael picked out his human name a long time before he was offered a human suit. My kale. It was terrible; why would anyone ever want to own kale? It was perfect. Michael was never going to change it.

He was offered a choice between two human suits. One of the two was proudly displayed, folded up nicely in the box like it was begging to become The Face Of Michael. It was a short, shrimpy-looking man (Michael was 99% sure it was man, even though he wasn't familiar with human genders yet), who looked like he had a constantly runny nose. Michael knew that a suit like that would get him a lot of compliments. He hated it.

The second suit wasn't a dream come true either. First, demons didn't dream. Most of them didn't even sleep. Second, the suit’s eyes were defective. Michael was going to have to wear those annoying pieces of glass for the rest of his existence, because he'd already decided that the white-haired suit was the one he wanted. It looked...well, he wasn't sure exactly how it looked, but it was right.

It took some effort to squeeze himself into it. He almost tore the nostrils with his horns as he pulled the skin over his head. It was already a torture just to put it on.

Michael took one look in the mirror with the suit's defective eyes and knew he was never going to take it off. This suit was going to serve a greater purpose than simply teaching him how to torture a human. This was _him_.

 

-

 

Before the human suit, Michael had liked to rub his legs together (all six of them at once when he had  _really_ needed to move, although that wasn't an easy position to get into or out of) when he felt like he needed to move around, stimulate himself a little. But the human suit only had two legs.

He tried rubbing them together as he had with his former body. Start by clicking his knees together until it hurts a little, then make his legs slide up and down each other until he no longer felt like screaming. Huh, so that still worked with the meat suit. Not as well, but it worked. He could get used to it.

It wasn't as stimulating as before. But it worked. He wanted it to work better, to give him the same level of stimulation that he'd been able to get in his other form.

Michael did what architects do: he problem-solved.

Rubbing his legs together was less stimulating with the human suit because there was cloth in the way. If he wore a garment that didn't separate his legs, it would be fine.

Nope! Showing up to work in a horribly neon (and therefore very stylish) dress-suit thing that he'd stolen from his neighbor was not fine, although no one would tell Michael why.

"Hey, did you transfer from the Bewilderment Department, man?"

"Er, no. Why?"

"I thought only the Bewilderers got to break human gender norms, man! Okay, your meat suit has a dick, right?"

Michael didn't really understand why the question was being asked, but he nodded anyway. This guy was probably higher up than him, and Michael didn't want to jeopardize his chances of becoming an architect.

"Okay, man, I'm gonna give you some tips, 'cause you're obviously in need, okay? Okay, man, listen. If someone's meat suit has a dick, they're only allowed to cover their legs separately. If someone's meat suit has titties, they're allowed to have one leg sheath or two separate ones. But your suit got a dick, man, so you gotta change. Now. I kinda got put in charge of dress code enforcement, okay?"

 

-

 

Michael's favorite color really was pliergloss. He'd always told his fellow demons that he enjoyed it because of the irony it implied, because both the soldier and the dog would soon die and go to the Bad Place. He did find it a little funny, but he also didn't mind the strange, sickeningly sweet and minty feeling that it sometimes gave him. The color just felt right.

One of his bowties was colored with the human approximation of pliergloss. Aquamarine, with shiny, barely noticeable threads of orange running through it. Michael said it makes him look more appealing to the humans each time he happened to be wearing it when they arrived after another reboot. The truth is, he didn't think they ever noticed it. It just looked nice.

 

-

 

Michael hated the human who had popularized the word 'retard' in the Bad Place. Its predecessors, 'idiot' and 'stupid', had been manageable, and sometimes even funny. He hadn't minded when the Bad Janets began adding those two words to their vocabulary.

He hated the word retard. His fellow demons started using it just after he became a full-time apprentice ("Look at that retard over there. Does he really think that's gonna work?" "So Michael—he's the retarded Architect apprentice with the white haired suit, in case you didn't know—he said...") and boy did he attract the word like a magnet. Michael was a bad word magnet. It sucked, because he wasn't a Janet and magnets only made him sad, not drunk.

 

-

 

He'd loved the idea of humans for as long as he could remember. Even before they arrived on the planet, Michael dreamt of a life form that would feel something more than pain when it was tortured. And then, only a few millennia after expressing his opinion had firmly branded him as a weirdo, the first humans evolved. Michael watched, jealously, as the higher-ups were given human suits and adopted the human alphabet while he was stuck with the illiterate form of a giant, eldritch stag beetle with white-hot magma instead of blood.

Sometimes, early in the morning when everyone was too hungover to stop him, Michael snuck into the Department of Human Affairs and stared at the dead humans. They were so fragile. So ridiculously fragile and emotional. They were incredibly fascinating.

He couldn't wait to get his claws into one. Find out exactly how a human reacted to torture, firsthand. He'd had enough of hearing everyone talk about how rewarding it was to pour salt over onto the exposed innards of a human and watch the organs shrivel up (like snails, he was told), how funny it was when a human begged for their bones to be put back inside their body, how tiring it was when a human passed out because apparently they couldn't deal with having little termite-woodpecker hybrids slowly burrow through their flesh and peck holes in their heart. Michael was excited to witness it all firsthand.

His first job was to poke humans with a hot metal stick. It was boring after the first two days. Michael showed up, warmed up his rod (he didn't understand sexual innuendos at the time, and never really would), and waited for the humans to come through. He was good at his job, but it bored him until he figured out a way to keep it interesting. He broke his stick into three different sticks and wielded them all at once. Now that there were three sticks, the job became interesting for a while.

Michael spent almost a year discovering all the different places that humans could be poked. When that got boring, Michael experimented with heating the rods to different temperatures and bending them into new shapes so that they were almost like brands. He put in a request for a wooden stick, and used that to burn the humans. He dribbled molten bits of the metal sticks on top of the burns.

Michael may have had a reputation for being a weirdo and his coworkers may have called him a retard, but no one could say he wasn't good.

 

-

 

Michael did end up using the stress ball. He'd always liked squeezing things, like spleens (the squishiest organ) and other insectile demons' antennae, which were softer than people thought. A stress ball would be just like a small, guilt-free spleen, Michael reasoned. Guilt was the feeling he got when he thought about torturing people, Michael was 99% sure. He liked moving his hands, so this stress ball would be good for him.

He found out later that giving him the stress ball had been Chidi's idea. Michael thanked him and asked why that specific object was included in the Human Starter Kit. He did want to learn the reason, but his demonic side (which was much bigger than his human side) wanted to make Chidi uncomfortable. Michael knew that was wrong, and that wasn't the real reason he was asking, but still. He was learning about principles and it seemed like he had to focus on his curiosity and not his old habits.

"I really like moving my hands," Chidi explained, "but sometimes I need to focus on something and I can't because my hands are waving around. Squeezing things helps me with that. I noticed that you tend to gesticulate a lot when you talk, so I thought you might be the same way. If you don't want the stress ball, I'll take it."  
Michael didn't know what to say. He hadn't expected Chidi's answer to hit so close to home.

Human speech was weird and the mechanics of a human mouth were confusing. Add to that the fact that English (the most confusing human language) was the lingua franca in the Bad Place, and Michael got his own personal communication hell. Saying words required a _lot_ of concentration. Making gestures with his arms helped keep his mind on track when he spoke, but he knew that his movements were distracting. Before reboot 802, Michael wouldn't have cared about that, but he was an honorary human now and he knew what having friends felt like and he wanted to be better.

He kept the stress ball.

 

-

 

"Chidi, what's the emotion where you're happy, but for someone else? Otherhappy? Ecto-joy?"

Chidi glanced up from his book and rubbed his forehead in thought. "Pride?"

•

"What do you call the emotion that's sort of angry, but happy, because something just happened?"

Chidi sighed. Surprise seemed like something a demon would already know about, so he said as much.

"I think you mean surprise, but don't you guys already have that in the Bad Place?"

•

Chidi made Michael a chart. Okay, Chidi asked Janet for a chart and Janet somehow knew exactly what was needed and then Chidi gave the chart to Michael and hoped it would work.

"Okay, so in the middle here we've got some of the most basic emotions: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, and happiness. If you can recognize these, you'll probably be all set," Chidi explained. Michael took the chart in his hands and stared at it. Chidi stood there for an uncomfortably long time before Michael said anything.

"This is too complicated."

Chidi wanted to just leave and make Eleanor deal with the emotionally constipated immortal being, but he knew that if she was in charge of 'Operation Get Michael to Feel Things', as she'd dubbed it, everyone would be worse off. Obviously, the ethical thing to do was help Michael out.

"What's complicated about it?"

"How do you ever know what emotion you're feeling?"

Chidi didn't know how to answer that. He'd assumed that Michael had some kind of framework to build his understanding of human emotions on, but it was beginning to seem like the guy had absolutely no idea. Still, Chidi had promised to help.

"Chidi, I'm serious," Michael added. "I've never had any idea how to tell one emotion from another."

Well, this sucked.

"You know which emotions feel good and which ones feel bad, right?"

"Yeah, but there's so many of them. How do you people do this _all the time?_ Just casually identify your emotions?"

"I guess it just takes practice."

 

-

 

Michael had never seen a bowtie before Janet showed one to him.

"Janet?"

She appeared, and Michael jumped a little before remembering what he wanted to ask her. He was never going to completely get used to the sound a Good Janet made when she popped out of her void. It was like a tinny reproduction of a the sound a bone made when it was popped out of its socket, but nicer. Less torture-y and...less torture-y.

Right. His question. "Janet, what color tie do you think I should be wearing when I greet the humans?"

"Please make a more specific request. Does the color have to be perceptible to human eyes? Also, would you like a straight tie or a bowtie?"

So many choices. But what the fork—the swear filter annoyed Michael, but it would annoy Eleanor even more—was a bow tie?

"What's a bow tie, Janet?"

The pleasant tinny bone pop chimed again, and Janet was holding a strip of cloth in one hand and a circle with a strange knot in the middle in her other hand. Michael stared at the knot for a second before he reached out and took it.

"Bowties are considered very stylish, although some people find them more eccentric than fashionable. Many humans prefer to..."

Michael tuned out Janet's spiel on bowties as he looked at the one in his hands. It looked fun. In the Bad Place (the 'real' Bad Place, at least), ties had to be depressing, trashy, or both. Nobody had ever told Michael that accessorizing could be fun.

"Janet, I would like a box full of these."

**Author's Note:**

> i decided that his 'true form' looks like a stag beetle because when i was a kid those things used to hang out around this one tree stump in the woods that had a big hole in it and so i thought the stump was a portal to hell and yeah......i used to catch them and examine the 'demons' and idk! ive always associated stag beetles with demons. they're cool but seven year old me definitely knew they were from hell.  
> also: feedback. feedback is super sexy pls leave a comment and/or kudos :))


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